Miri Hutcherson was gracious enough to be my first model for long-exposure portraits. She was writing a theology paper at the time, and I loved the paper set-up she had around her, especially the makeshift tea-cozy.

The pictures were taken with a Polaroid medium format camera using 665 black and white film, which gives you a positive and a negative for each image. These pictures really show the trial-and-error process that was required for the exposure settings and the posing.

Miri did sit still for all of these photographs. One reason they all turned out so blurry was that I was not closing the shutter properly, so in all of these pictures the camera recorded the scene after we thought the picture was taken. Oddly, the first photo, in which Miri is the least blurry, had the largest exposure time - a minute instead of 15-30 seconds.

Between the blurry photos and the one where Miri didn't even show up at all, it is as if I inadvertently captured occult images. It was especially spooky to open the polaroid and find that Miri was not in the picture at all when I knew she had been sitting in front of me. I think the camera kept recording after she left, which is why the entire chair is defined.